This is the city: Los Angeles, California. I work here. I'm an ex-mayor. Los Angeles is a magnet for people from all over the world. Some of them run for public office. Inevitably some of them stray from the golden rule and rule for those that have the gold. That's when I go to work. My name is Yorty. I'm a dead pol.

Monday, February 14, 2005

We don't need a downtown park

Its terrific that people like the LA Downtown News' Sam Hall Kaplan can sit down there and all day ruminate on how he thinks Downtown LA should look on the public dime.

Back in my day, we designed the Civic Center for utilitarian purposes - get the government agencies all near one another for greatest efficiency.

The City wants to build a new and desperately needed LAPD headquarters on land across the street from City Hall. This is the most cost effective program.

Kaplan wants that land to be a "grand park" in which I guess he can sit and ruminate about things as they should be. We discussed this before and we discussed how we have a grand park in LA already - its called Griffith Park.

The Cultural Affairs Commission (Why do we need this? Yet another waste of taxpayer money that could very easily be handled by the private sector) is begging the City Council to build this monstrosity, but it appears that as the City Council is starting to get it (by voting against unnecessary tax increases), they do not want to build the park. Probably they don't want to take the heat for it, which I agree is a good move on their part - because they would never hear the end of it.

What this city needs is fewer schemes and more getting about the business of efficient, cost effective government. That police headquarters will serve more people from Chatsworth to San Pedro than Kaplan's damn park.

2 Comments:

Anonymous said:

The whole idea for the park at the LAPD headquartes came because that is the same site where CM Perry had promised a park to her residents. The LAPD then had it's eye on the site so they put the ideas together. I think it is a good idea to have a mixed used area.

I agree with above poster. We need a new LAPD headquarters. Parker center is disgusting and needs to be torn down. Or, better yet we can house the Mayor, Council and their staff there. That might motivate them to move forward with improving the working environment of our finest LAPD.